The Indie/Zine RPG Guide Part III: A Grim Hack

A Grim Hack (From Monster at my Desk)

Resource Page here on itch.io 

$12 from Exalted Funeral or PWYW on itch.io 

I snagged A Grim Hack on a lark, during one of several random "that looks interesting" expeditions in to Exalted Funeral's amazing webstore. Honestly, after reading it the first time I more or less forgot about it and stuck it on a shelf until recently when I got a free code for the book and resources over at playrole.com, which prompted me to dig it out again and explore it a bit more. Here's what I discovered.

What it is: A Grim Hack is nakedly straight up in its goal: to provide a slim alternative rulebook the Zweihander Grim & Perilous Adventures, which is in turn an unabashed retroclone of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1st or 2nd edition, I am not sure which). So in theory the goal of A Grim Hack is to provide an easy ruleset that I suppose could work as a substitution for sourcebooks and material from either of its related systems.

The Rules: A Grim Hack is an incredibly dense summary of the core conceits of the Zweihander/Warhammer mechanical expressions. You have eight stats, a percentile resolution mechanic, skills, professions, ancestries (which are basically personality traits), lots of combat rules, and a dense but useful magic system. It hints at other ways to use the rulebook. 

A Grim Hack is also an unabashed "basic rules only" overview. You will need to go to the itch.io page linked above if you want the stuff a GM will need to actually run the game (monsters, NPC rules, a scenario). You could probably use the other books it is a condensed clone of as resources, but the GM PDF supplements really do help. I rather wish that A Grim Hack had published a second volume with these rules in print, but it looks like for now they are on PDF only through itch.io.

The Setting: not a single whiff of setting detail, outside of what you make of it, with some hinting that A Grim Hack would make for a fine medieval life simulator (and I think it would). It talks a bit about games without magic, or games with rare magic, and that's about it.

The game has some decent black and white art, ranging from "zine quality-okay" to decently evocative, such as the cover. A couple illustrations fall in to the "back of the high school notebook" category, but it has no impact on the product's presentation, which is emphatically about cataloging a set of extremely condensed rules.

Support: exclusively on itch.io, where several pay-what-you-want PDFs can be found with some mundane and fantastical monsters, NPC design rules and a scenario. 

In the end, A Grim Hack stands out as being distinctly unlike a lot of other digest size zine RPGs in that its mechanically complex and dense, surprisingly so for the size of the rules at 40 pages. But, as the developer freely admits, his goal was to have a ruleset that he could pull out which did not scare players away with 400-500 page rulebooks.

Unfortunately I am not well versed in any of the base systems A Grim Hack riffs from, so I do not know if its works well as a substitution rulebook or not. It definitely seems like it can stand on its own two feet, if you download the free resources to provide GM content.

Who Should Get This? I suggest that if you are in the same boat as the author, and like the mechanical style of Warhammer/Zweihander but would rather have a 40 pages rulebook than a 400 page rulebook then you might like this. Alternatively, if you want a gritty, surprisingly deep (for 40 pages) character and combat system, and want to run your own weird medieval campaign then this may be up your alley. 

Up Next: Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells

The Indie/Zine RPG Guide Part II: Mork Borg

Mork Borg (published by Free League Publishing in the US)

Developed by Ockult Ortmastare Games and Stockholm Kartel

$40 MSRP in print (a very nice edition with gold and silver foil, ribbon markers) or $25 PDF on Drivethrurpg.com

Mork Borg Resource Page

Before reviewing Mork Borg (which is Swedish for Dark Fortress), I wanted to make some comments: the first is that this is possibly the first RPG of this style in the US (Sweden, maybe, too) and it, along with Mothership, codified the concept space of these sort of zine scene/arthouse rpgs. It is a decidedly old school product: this game bears little direct resemblance to the OSR from one view, but it is deeply rooted in the OSR concept space from another angle. Goodman Games' Dungeon Crawl Classics was designed to evoke that sense of surprise and mystery that D&Ders experienced in the seventies by adding weird dice, random magic charts, an emphasis on non-standard monsters and a higher risk of death and doom for PCs early on; Mork Borg accomplishes this right out of the gate: making the experience of fantasy gaming weird, new, interesting and entirely unpredictable. 

What it is: a fantasy RPG that uses exotic graphic art design reminiscent of apocalyptic Catholic and medieval imagery, Swedish death metal album cover art and stuff you might find doodled on the back of a high school notebook in the 80's and 90's (or maybe any generation for all I know) to inform and explore a minimalist game world on the brink of a nightmare apocalypse. The game also evokes a sense that too many From Soft games were played in the making of it (Dark Souls and Demon Souls specifically). 

The System: Mork Borg has a very simple mechanical design at its heart with four character stats, and a roll-high mechanic where you roll D20 plus modifiers against static difficulty checks. It randomizes almost the entire character creation process, and most monsters can be defined in two or three lines of text. The game's base magic system consists of scrolls, and anyone can cast them if they want to push their luck. The spell system, including the failure charts, is all of four pages but grants incredible power with high risks. The optional classes may also gain some unique magic talents.

Mork Borg does not require character classes, and human (or something akin to human) is the only racial option. The optional classes are evocative of the setting,wracked with madness and mystery. The Fanged Deserter is a warrior who honed his natural bite to perfection; the Gutterborne Scum is the rogue, but one born to the grim city and twisted by it; the Esoteric Hermit just emerged from a cave with dark powers; Wretched Royalty deal with the legacy of their noble family; Heretical Priests seek to escape the persecution of the official religion of the Two-Headed Basilisk; and the Occult Herbmaster brews strange and deadly concoctions. More optional classes appear in the official books Feretory and Heretic, as well as many third party sourcebooks.

The system includes rules for character advancement, which is awarded at GM whim, with a focus on improved abilities, a chance to boost hit points, and some loot you might find. The real advancement comes from emergent gameplay; you can find powerful scrolls, discover hellish artifacts, be transformed and transmogrified by horrible spell failures, and develop a fearsome reputation over time. If you can keep a character alive in Mork Borg for long enough, it can grow impressively in power. 

The Setting: Mork Borg spends the majority of its art and about half the book outlining the grim world at the center of which is the vast, warped city of Galgenbeck, surrounded by horrid realms such as the Forest of Sorkash, the Valley of the Unfortunate Undead and the coastal city of Grift. Every region reads like a worst-case scenario for a D&D Ravenloft campaign if the dark lords became unhinged, and if you've ever delved into the lore of Dark Souls you will sense that some interesting inspiration is afoot.

Although the setting, through short introductions and evocative art is quite inspiring, the core book does not linger for long, preferring to inform by example and through the use of many random tables and charts. The book includes 12 example monsters that set the frame for how different a monster can be in Mork Borg....goblins, for example, also known as the seth, are grim beasts which mark those they attack, and then flee. If you don't find and kill the goblin which marked you within 1D6 days your body shrivels and warps as your consciousness is consumed by the presence of your new mind, that of of a goblin, and you remain trapped, helpless as it carries on. Another example is the Aland Wickhead Knife Wielder, a grim humanoid with a lantern for a head which stalks victims, ignites its head as it attacks with a filthy knife, then escapes once more into the night.

Why does the goblin work like this? What made the Aland and what drives it? These are questions for your GM and group to decide or ignore as you see fit; the point is that the grim universe of Mork Borg is so close to the apocalyptic end that beasts like this are just everyday menaces for you to deal with.

The core book does include a starting scenario, which is also a good introduction to what Mork Borg scenario design looks like. It's also design for brevity, and eschews excess expository text. If you ever tried to read any typical modern module with pages of backstory and lead-in that are ultimately useless to actual play, this module avoids those long blocks of "information on the backstory only the GM gets to know about" kind of stuff. It falls somewhere between "written for a large audience" and "my personal notes and outline of a game that only I can make sense of," turning instead into a decent but very to-the-point module that can be run after about fifteen minutes of reading for prep. In fact most of the Mork Borg modules work like this.

A key thing to understand about Mork Borg's setting is that it is meant to provide evocative inspiration, but practically everything is meant to be a spring-board and avoid burdening the GM with excessive details. Indeed, it is a game which a GM who likes to expound improvisationally from a starting point will greatly enjoy. It is not going to appeal to someone who would like to have the setting carefully outline and explain all of these details, though some 3rd party sourcebooks try to do this; it's actually really hard to restrain ones' self from over-writing in a game where brevity is a target goal, and a lot of the third party content fails on this mark.

Support: Mork Borg is disgustingly well supported with all sorts of weird stuff. Aside from the official books (Feretory, Heretic, the GM screen and the Ikhons boxed set prop) there's just a ton of inspiring weird content out there in both PDF and print. Stuff I have picked up for the game include:

From Free League:

Feretory  - an offical book, with new classes, scenarios, random table, a monster generator and artifacts. Indispensable sourcebook. 

Heretic - the second official book. Has a cult generator, unheroic feats (a system of granting new abilities to non-classed characters), more scenarios, a class, monsters, and Mork Borg's take on wishes. Also an indispensable resource.

Ikhons - Another Free League offering, this is a little black box filled with four pamphlets that can represent a tome captured in the game, which when held in possession grants random powers through the summoning of ancient and sacrilegious folk gods that can do terrible things if you sacrifice enough. A bit pricey for what you get but worth it if you fall in love with the game. 

The GM Screen - a five panel screen with two extra inserts you can clip in, filled with useful tables (some of which I think are only on the screen) and rules summaries. A very handy, sturdy screen with great foil-based art on the player-facing side.

From Exalted Funeral: 

Bestiary - if you are craving more monsters but are lacking the mental aberration necessary to visualize what such beasts would look like in the Mork Borg universe, then this is an excellent resource for you. 64 pages of weird monsters and lairs in Mork Morg appropriate art style.

The Valley of Forbidden Churches - lovely location book, a grim valley in which various increasingly hideous and depraved cults set up shop and then descend into chaos, followed by the Demonworm Tunnels and the twisted Silver City. The module and maps work out to make a great hexcrawl styled adventure for Mork Borg.

From Steve Jackson Games:

Calo's Book of Monsters - this oddly sized tome contains elaborate write-ups of the eponymous wizard Calo, 20 or so monsters and Castle Skullrot location. The book's most endearing and entirely inappropriate feature is that it provides copious details on its entries, with lavish Mork Borg-styled illustrations. The reason this is entirely inappropriate is that I am dead certain this book has a larger word count than the entirety of the Mork Borg rule book plus Feretory combined. As a result its a great book, lots of detail, but reads and feels more like a traditional RPG sourcebook, missing the ethos of brevity characteristic of Mork Borg by a slight bit. Still worth a buy! Phil Reed does a lot of generic supplements, but his content for Mork Borg is incredibly useful and evocative...most is under his own publishing label, but he did this one through Steve Jackson Games (where he also works) for some reason. Maybe to advertise all the cool dice and dice bags SJGames sells to Mork Borg players? 

There are other supplements out there I seek to acquire, but this is what I have so far.

Who is Mork Borg For? Well, my suggestion is the following people will find Mork Borg worth checking out:

1. You want a rules lite system with a grimdark aesthetic that has lots of dynamic emergent gameplay and effects/affects that change the PCs every game.

2. You want a game that gives you just enough to riff from, but makes painstaking efforts only to inspire you with the setting, rather than dictate it to you. You like the idea that one of the things you do at the start of a campaign is roll dice to find out how many years, months, weeks or days are left before the apocalypse happens.

3. You do not have difficulty parsing out text from exotic artistic layouts and weird fonts. This is critical; read the many, many comments from people on the drivethrurpg page for Mork Borg to see just how perplexing the layout was to some. Good news is: the Mork Borg site has a free no-art version of the entire text for people who need it. But...to be honest....the game kind of needs the art, it is incredibly important to establishing the game's tone and style. In this game, the art speaks volumes, and is critical to the experience.

4. You want fantasy, but you would like to see something that is in a new concept space previously unexplored or otherwise untouched by more traditional fantasy RPGs that have let D&D act as the benchmark for too many decades. 

So: I highly recommend Mork Borg if you want to see something genuinely different and weird. 

Next: The Grim Hack!

A Brief Guide to Indie/Zine RPGs - Part I: Overview

My recent obsession with the zine scene has left me with lots of reading, pondering and contemplating how to introduce my graming groups to this weird corner of the hobby over which I am now almost entirely obsessed. I can't even think about running something as mundane as D&D 5E right now, it just feels so....tiring. Worn. Plebian? Been there and done that. The following games? Not at all.

The market for this weird indie corner of the hobby is a bit hard to describe. The term Zine RPG seems to fit best, because a nontrivial number of these games come from various Zine challenges over the last few years leading to ways for designers to create compact but full featured rulesets in limited page counts. Not all have been successful, but the ones that are really stand out. Some of these have devolved from zines to brochures...the trifold pamphlet corners a significant chunk of the scenario and expansion market on Exalted Funeral, for example, and about half of the supplements out for Mothership are in the form of these tri-folds. They are an interesting way of taking a tight space and making it work for what is needed, while also rethinking entirely what it takes for a module to be considered "good to go." 

While Zine RPGs have their roots in indie games, I hesitate to use that term to describe them because some of these systems have big budgets and big followings (or feel like it). Mork Borg is indie only in a spiritual sense, Into the Odd, Ultraviolet Grasslands....indie, sure, but they are also closer to "zine RPGs" than might be obvious. Into the Odd, for example, is the same mechanical system as you will find in Screams Amongst the Stars and several other RPGs that are definitely "zine RPGs." But....we'll lump these larger non-zine sized RPGs in to this group. One could also call these the "itch.io" genre but usually that's the fermenting ground for many, who then become popular enough to elevate to print products of greater value elsewhere.

Features all of these games tend to have in common include:

1. Brevity of Design - the game provides a very small footprint from "picking up the book" to "we are playing the game." These games often cut out anything even remotely looking or feeling like filler text and expository text, assuming the reader either knows all that stuff or doesn't want it to begin with.

2. Artistic Liberties unseen outside of music album covers; these games often feel like a guy with a vision for a game met a buddy with an artistic streak of madness and together they produce something that can be simultaneously brilliant and difficult to parse out. The end result can just be a very satisfying game that doubles as a coffee table art piece on down to something which appears to be a graphic designer's submission for graduation from art college, with words approximating a game hidden somewhere within.

3. Weird. Weird! REALLY WEIRD. These are all games that defy genre conventions by taking the established norms and inverting them in as many interesting ways as possible. Mothership takes the tried and true formula of a game like Traveller and recreates it as an Alien/Thing/Body Snatchers simulator. Mork Borg takes D&D fantasy and says what if Appendix N was actually just a list of heavy metal album covers and lyrics mixed with grim Catholic imagery. Liminal Horror grabs the contemporary zeitgeist of modern horror and shows how The Backrooms can be melded to a game like Control with themes from Hellboy, and turned into an even stranger, darker and grimmer experience than the classic Call of cthulhu. If you've got a weird take on a genre that kills all the darlings, it fits here.

4. High Concept and Low Budget. These are often quite gorgeous but the vast majority of the books are also print and staple affairs, and even the high budget games emulate the "We made this at Kinkos" look on purpose. Not all do this, but the deliberate melding of a brevity in design with highly atypical art styles gives all games in this weird subgenre a unique look. 

5. Advancement is through play and not the rules, and are also brutal in this process. Most of the games in this style of design are unflinching in providing grim worlds, worst case scenarios as a starting point, mechanics which encourage character strife and death or genre-appropriate behaviors, and almost without exception they tend to eschew the notion of playing heroic and successful types (at least to start). They are often built around rules that avoid advancement and improvement entirely, or make it very hard or make it something that happens entirely through emergent play. The key goal seems to be to move the game space away from carefully codified concepts (like D&D's classes and species) and to force everyone to think outside the box. If your sorcerer in Mork Bog misfires a spell and is liquefied into a living skeleton: that's a good thing! It builds character. If your Mothership character is now host to a race of alien parasites: we call that growth, in more ways than one. 

Okay! End part one. Next up we'll start looking at these games (or at least the ones I have). For reference, here's what we'll take a look at:

Fantasy Games:

Mork Borg

Into the Odd

A Grim Hack

Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells

Science Fiction Horror Games:

Mothership (along with several hundred supplements)

Death in Space

Screams Amongst the Stars

Vast Grimm

Zyborg Commando RPG

Cyberpunk Games:

Cy_BORG

Running out of Time

Dancing with Bullets Under a Neon Sun

NooFutra (Mothership cyberpunk hack)

Horror Games:

Dead Malls

Liminal Horror

Liminal (not the same as LH)

Into the Zone

The Dead Are Coming

Hard to Classify:

Ultraviolet Grasslands

Electric Bastionland

Solar Blades & Cosmic Spells (it's maybe space fantasy?)

There are a few games I debated including on this list, but ultimately left them off. If they didn't quite fit the following criteria I excluded them:

1. Did I look at the rulebook initially and go "I have no idea how to start reading this," and then an hour later said, "That can't be the entire ruleset, can it?"

2. Did the game have a two page summary of the entire ruleset buried somewhere within?

3. Is more than half the game random charts? 

If none of those qualified (see, for example: Ryuutama, Tri-Stat, Rogue Element, etc.) then I excluded them even if they definitely felt "indie." They just weren't "zine" enough for this list.

Although Old School Essentials and Dungeon Crawl Classics both feel in the spirit of this genre of games, I feel that they are too traditonal in their ways to count. That said...OSE and DCC both arguably have an influence in this genre. 

We'll start with Mork Borg and the other fantasy systems next!

The Asus ROG Ally Part II: 25 days in

 I mentioned I'd do a part II to this last time, and here I am. Has it really been 25 days since the device came out? Dang, time flies. Anyway, plenty of time to make the following observations. I'm just going to bullet point all of this for fun:

1. The TL;DR Winner of Handhelds: If you just want cheap gaming on the go and aren't particular, get a Switch. The Switch is still the king of this corner of portable gaming, hands down. But if you want to see your console library unlocked on portable devices, then of course the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally are requisites for you. What you're really choosing is "Linux or Windows" so pick wisely.

2. Battery Life: The Switch is the only device of the three that could probably keep you entertained for a full 2-3 hours before recharging becomes necessary. Both Steam Deck and the Ally are going to require fiddling with the settings to squeeze more than an hour of life out of their batteries. This essentially makes them portable in the sense of "I can plug this in to the hotel when I get there," but not "I can play this on the airplane/bus/tram/fishing boat/subway during commutes." I mean....the Deck and Ally could probably work here, if your commute is an hour or so. 

3. Updates: After 25 days and countless updates the Ally is working quite well. But my understanding is the Steam Deck had a similar growing pain phase in its initial release. Just make sure you are updating this thing for Windows 11, the Asus firmware, the bios and the Armory Crate and all will be fine. 

4. Heating Issues: I have never had an issue with overheating on the Steam Deck and of course the Switch would need to have a proper flame applied to it to overheat, but the Ally does have some overheating issues. Specifically, it has placed the MicroSD chip slot directly above one of the key heat vents. Asus has apparently released a firmware update that works on better fan output to assist here. Though I have had no issues other than some obvious stuttering in a game I tried playing from the MicroSD card that acted like it was having issues due to overheating,* stories are out there of people getting their microSD cards cooked. How common this is I am uncertain, but the good news is I have not experienced the overheating issue since the latest bios and firmware updates that just came out. But....the placement of the microSD was a poor choice on Asus's part.

MicroSD Formatting PRO TIP: Make sure if you get a MicroSD to format it in NTFS format if you plan to load any Xbox for PC games on it. I popped my 1 TB card in, saw it was preformatted, but did not realize it came formatted in exFAT which my understanding is better for photo storage, while NTFS is better for large files such as games. 

Outside of those specific points its been a fine experience. I have spent some time testing out various games, including Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War (and Vanguard), Outriders, XIII, Killer is Dead, Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance, Octopath Traveller, Halls of Torment, Diablo Immortal and Assassin's Creed Origins....all worked great, and to varying degrees each translated well into handheld mode. I have had the most fun with Destiny 2 on the Ally, interestingly. 

Honestly.....I would have felt less keen on investing in the Ally if it had been possible to play Destiny 2 and other games I had in my GOG, Battle.net, Xbox and Epic Games libraries on the Steam Deck. You can get some working....I did get a few on Epic to work on the Steam Deck with some painful effort. Xbox games was a bigger pain, and not all would play nice in the linux environment. GOG was a nightmare. Battle.net allegedly would work on the Steam Deck with the right proton downloads but every tutorial showed a completely different process that was often incomprehensible or didn't align with how my Steam Deck was working. 

Being able to just load all this stuff on the Asus ROG Ally and play it has been nice. There are some games I have which are especially suited to the "play while wandering around, or at the dinner table, or on break, or on a trip" style, such as incredibly long titles like Assassin's Creed Odyssey which has otherwise been a difficult title to pin down due to the time demand it calls for, so I am loving having it for spot play on the Ally. Destiny 2 is naturally suited for pick up and play like this. Likewise, being able to replay a Call of Duty campaign or load a private game with bots to pass the time is fun. I have not as of yet been brave enough to try live multiplayer, assuming I would get slaughtered. Have not loaded Modern Warfare though I'd like to, but that is a notoriously large download size (215+ GB as I recall). Stuff like Halls of Torment, Diablo and Octopath Traveller are practically made for the Ally. Alas, Torchlight II did not like the control scheme and was a real pain so I pulled it from the Ally. It's Switch version of course works just great.

I've encountered a few games that fall into the "this is fun, but the graphics are too tiny for me to really dig playing this in handheld mode" category. Champions of Alaloth is one, with graphics too dainty and text too precise for my eyes. Outriders borders on it, with text too small to read, but luckily a big chunk of that game is about the shooting, not reading. Torchlight II and III both ran like crap on it, no nice way to put it, though II probably because the PC edition has never been controller optimized, and Torchlight III is a bit janky and broken on anything you play it on, anyway. 

FYI Diablo IV is great on the Ally, but I am not playing it on the Ally because I want to enjoy that game for the time being on a nice big screen monitor.

Okay, that's it! I have too many hand-helds, but if someone made me ditch all but one I think I'd probably give serious consideration to making my decision in favor of the Asus ROG Ally. That said....it would be a very close decision between it and the Steam Deck as well as the Switch, which still manages to nail the "carry and play on the go" thing best. 

*In the Ally's defense I had been running the device for like 10 hours straight filling up the 1 TB card and doing loads of updates. So by the time I tried out that game it was quite hot. Probably a good sign not to run it for 10 hours straight, maybe. I tested a game located on the C drive for contrast and it ran just fine, and after letting it sit for an hour off to cool down the game (Outriders) then ran without any issues, so it was definitely an overheating issue affecting the MicroSD. Bad form, Asus. Some Youtube videos I've seen suggest that breaking in to it and installing a SSD card larger than 512MB might be the way to go, but we'll see. If you do that, make sure to register and back up your device in the ASUS cloud.  

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

 Just saw it! This movie was somehow both amazing and completely average. I was torn between the fact that I knew, as I watched it, that the stuff I was most enjoying was already being lambasted by critics, and based on some of the after-view commentary I overheard, including from some chubby 20-something talking about how he has "lived long enough to see his childhood hero fail," that I suspect this movie won't play well to audiences. Its third act was amazing.....just not in a world today populated by Marvel multiverses and DC Flashpoints. Gah.

Anyway, I'll just say that while this movie was hardly necessary, it was a fine adventure and in most spots managed to feel much more like a true Indiana Jones movie than the fourth film. It's clever use of real archaeological details mixed with clever fictions (in the Indiana Jones universe the Antikythera Mechanism is a much more dramatically intact and useful object...the eponymous Dial of Destiny in the title, if you will) made for a kind of more familiar mixture of classic Indiana Jones, sullied only occasionally by moments where the set pieces felt too CGI enhanced. That said....a lot of this movie felt like it was more traditionally filmed with live action sequences, making the moments where it seemed like CGI was in use stand out all the more.

I enjoyed it, overall. I would give it a solid A, and having seen all the other blockbusters this year so far, this is the only one I really felt like commenting on in the blog. Unfortunately I think that general audiences today are both too cynical to enjoy this movie, too divided over the old Lucas Film properties and what should be done with them, and too burned out on big set-piece action films that have to compete with Marvel movies to really care about this one. I could be wrong, but I doubt it. This will probably be the last "smart" action movie we see for a long time if it bombs. A real shame. And if you want to argue that point with me, then my contention above is proven correct. I think this was a good movie....not a great movie, and its perceived failures stem only from being #5 in a series that was much better when it was new and young, but I think anyone with an earnest appreciation for Indiana Jones, and who maybe was old enough to see Raiders of the Lost Ark when it originally released in the theaters, that you might just find this one a fun watch, and a bit sentimental, too.

Minor Spoilers! Here are the three things I disliked and five things I very much liked:

Good: the clever use of mixing archaeological fact and fiction to define the Antikythera Mechanism (just called the "Antikythera" in the movie) with the historical foundation lodged in Archimedes and the Siege of Syracuse to craft an interesting McGuffin for Indiana Jones to pursue. 

Bad: Harrison Ford's CGI de-aging didn't work for me as much as I thought it would, and his voice sounded too old for the age they were depicting.

Good: The movie handled a transition from the last film surprisingly well, and made it character relevant in a way that I thought worked. They refrained from too many callbacks which was good (and the ones we had were generally "relevant" as opposed to gratuitous, though Sallah maybe was just there because they could). 

Bad: A bug scene callback that proves the Indiana Jones universe just has a lot of really big bugs out there.

Good: The final act was amazing, I was very excited that they actually did what they did (won't say what, but it was brilliant).

Bad: Indiana Jones should have stayed. You'll see what I mean if you watch it! That would have been a true send-off. The maudlin actual ending was fine, too....but....grrrr. I was with him on that one.

Good: It's over, I feel like maybe they can please let Jones (and Ford) retire forever here, it was a fine final tale. 

Random Thought: why are there no Indiana Jones book or comic tie-ins? His early adventures could be exploited that way. I know my kid would read them (and I would too if they aren't aimed at the YA audience). Maybe those do exist and I just don't know about it. Or maybe modern audiences, no longer being readers of such staid forms of entertainment, don't make it worthwhile to produce such stuff? Hmmm. (EDIT: An Amazon search reveals a lot of old novels in a series, but we're talking books going back to the "written by Steve Perry" era of tie-ins. Also, lots of Scholastic adventures from 12-15 years ago, it looks like. So...yeah.....YMMV on these I guess. I'll stick to other stuff).

Grokking Mork Borg

 Recently I took time to pack up a lot of my books in anticipation of future moving, and in the process shuffled some of my collection to a stack of "must go" product. In the course of this, I reallocated precious shelf space to the myriad zinerpgs, chapbooks and other weird micro-indie-rpg products I have been slowly accruing, and among those lies Mork Borg.

I don't think it was specifically just Mork Borg which got me in to its strange blend of Dark Souls, Swedish Death Metal design and grim horror thematics. That stuff is cool, but not the reason. No, I think I have to blame some other artsy and weird RPGs for this moment of revelation in which the beauty of Mork Borg finally made sense to me: Mothership, certainly, but also Death in Space and Into the Odd, Screams Amongst the Stars, Into the Zone and Liminal Horror.* All great games, all with their own interesting design quirks and a desire to aim for minimalist mechanical design in hopes of exploiting inherent creativity and storytelling in the process. They are all spiritually OSR in the sense that the games want to exploit the players' inherent desire for challenge and need for unanticipated emergent gameplay as core to the experience, while also aiming for simple but modern rule structures that eschew procedural elements as much as possible. For these games, the intent Dungeon Crawl Classics aimed for, to capture that feel of being weird and different and surprising in the way D&D felt in 1974, is simply the starting state.

Mork Borg owes my sudden interest to the newish playrole.com VTT site, which appears to cater to theater of the mind and nonstandard RPGs extremely well, mixed with a moment, when I got some of my players into a room there with the ultra lite RPG Dead Malls, where rolling three main stats is one half of character generation, an the other half is picking three items of equipment. I realized that the liberating effect of having the minimalist, essential rules structure in place allowed me to do whatever I wanted with the rest of the game, which is about exploring urban decay in abandoned malls, and the hint of danger that comes from an era where the world online regularly invents monsters like slender man and siren head. 

It was then that I realized: Mork Borg is doing the same thing. The story of its world is all meant to inspire and evoke the genre it is depicting, sure, but the point is to have rules that inform the story, rather than the story being informed by the rules. If I am tired --and boy, am I tired!-- of D&D or Pathfinder with the hundreds of pages of exception based rules on every thing, then is Mork Borg, a shining blacklight in a sea of deep ones swimming ashore, with an entire magic system defined on a couple pages, and a setting where character growth of necessity is defined by how marvelously you manage to suffer and mutate due to the stress and pressure of  a dying fantasy world over time, if you don't just die outright. 

It's not for everyone, but it is definitely for me at this moment....as are its many cousins, such as the inimitable Mothership, Cy-Borg and so many more. I think, at last, I am going to start taking these games not just more seriously, but as maybe the zone I should start focusing on for a while, give the big fat-book RPGs a break for a bit, see if this is what my waning interest has needed to spark some interest in the hobby again.  

*I need to write more about and on all of these games. Liminal Horror is fascinating in and of itself. 

Transformers vs. Flash: Nostalgia Wars! (a Comparison Review of Two Venerable IPs)

 First, The Flash was a genuinely good movie, as superhero movies go, and I was overall quite impressed with it. I also like to note that I am an old DC fanboy and I have a lot of history with the IP in general, so it would have been hard for this movie to fail with me. That said....Ezra Miller was great in the movie, and it was fun to see Michael Keaton back as a retro Batman again. The core conceits of the movie captured the entire Flashpoint concept of the DC multiverse quite well. It had some rough spots, but overall this was a more generally enjoyable movie of its sort than the last few I have seen (with the caveat that Guardians of the Galaxy is unique in its role as a film that transcends its own medium). 

The week before we also caught Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. I spent a lot of that film's runtime just mildly bored as I watched the director try to merge the Michael Bay style of excess with the more human level of development found in the Bumblebee movie. It sort of fails at both styles as a result, but that's okay, because about 20% of the way in to the movie I started cataloging all of the little "childhood" logic moments that basically made this a kid's movie (or at least a teen film). It was operating on the fuel of a story told for kids, with the logic that makes sense to kids (and audiences with mild expectations). 

In the end, the new Transformers movie was a bust for me personally but it entertained my son (a bit; he's not really in to the Transformers). My wife liked it, but she is a bit younger than me. My entire Transformers experience is encapsulated in a time period from about 1983-1988 and is especially focused on those old "original generation" cartoons and the Marvel comics of the time. Anything after that point is more or less lost on me. She, however, grew up loving Beast Wars Transformers or whatever it is called, so she was looking forward to seeing more of those characters (even though all but two got precious few lines in the film).

Anyway.....I realized that the Transformers film was destined to fail for me because my nostalgia for the giant transforming robots is limited to a roughly 5-6 year window in my youth, after which I effectively left it behind. Indeed, my general lack of excitement for the modern movies is probably due to this; no modern conception of the film is going to come close to embracing my recollection of those early days, which is clouded by my own Transformers headcannon of collecting all those figures. The movies today need to reflect decades of the franchise, and the totality of a vast audience with many, many different takes. The only certainty is that they have successfully captured the inherent lack of overall logic or consistency in the many, many variations on The Transformers. It was never, ever the most consistent or plot-hole-free series (though the old comics certainly made an effort).

Meanwhile, The Flash is reflective of my obsession with both comics in general and DC in particular, especially Batman, which started when I was a tiny kid dressing up as the caped crusader, all the way to my thorough embrace of collecting DC following the Crisis on Infinite Earths, and my largely (mostly) successful effort to collect various DC comics for going on four decades now. My familiarity with the vast range of stories, characters and variations used to construct, like Frankenstein's monster, a movie out of the DC comic universe makes more sense to me. Seeing a return to an aged version of Batman from the 1989 film, now a reflection of a broken timestream by Barry Allen, is a genuine treat, as that movie informed much of my entertainment experience in 1989, along with the increasingly amazing Batman comics of the day, such as Dark Knight Returns and Arkham Asylum, both of which I used to write multiple papers on the transition of comics to film back then in one of my college classes, as well as an argument for how film noir had informed comics as a medium and Frank Miller in particular. So yeah, The Flash is not only better able to capitalize on the long history of its own universe, but I am also better suited to embracing it due to my own immersion.

It also helps that The Flash was just a better overall story with more vivacious actors who were given better lines (and Ezra Miller effectively steals every scene except when Keaton is present). If Transformers had better writing, I might be thinking more about how I enjoyed it.....but alas, it did not. 

Anyway, take this as a positive review of The Flash and if you are not a DC hater or burned out on superhero films I give it an A+! But for Transformers....go see if it you have kids who want to see it, too, but I can't say its really all that worth watching, except as pure family entertainment. 

ASUS ROG Ally vs. Steam Deck (Part 1)

 Yesterday my anticipated reserved ASUS ROG Ally came in for pickup, and I spent most of the day waiting patiently for the Windows 11 environment (and Armory Crate, and the firmware, and the bios...) to update, after which I loaded a variety of games from different platforms to test it out: Epic, Steam, Xbox so far, GOG coming soon.

You might be looking at one of these bad boys and wondering if the $699 pricetag is worth it over the equivalent Steam Deck for $629. Here's some observations I have made in the last day and a half of messing around with the ASUS ROG Ally to contrast with the Steam Deck, which I have had for about a year:

LINUX vs. WINDOWS: The Ally operates on Windows 11 with heavy use of the touch screen interface. Steam Deck, by contrast, is a Linux product, which has its own advantages and peculiarities. Right off the bat I can tell you that my many years of grudging experience working in Windows encironments means I find the Ally a more comfortable device to work with; I know what to do with it. The Linux environment of Steam Deck has been an interesting learning curve, and my greatest victory there has been getting some Epic games to work on it....while also failing to do so on almost every other level; my acumen for Linux is just not strong enough to figure out how to successfully do things like get Battle.net to work right, or run emulators, things Youtube Techies all seem to take for granted. Maybe my kid can figure it out, he's heavily into the modding scene these days.

So for now, the ASUS ROG Ally's Windows 11 based environment makes sense for me over Steam Deck, but it is nice to have an incentive to learn how to play in the Linux environment. Sort of.

GAME COMPATIBILITY: everything I have loaded so far has run without issue (after all updates were applied....there are a LOT of updates). I have several Epic Game store games running, Fortnite, Destiny 2, Outriders, Diablo IV, and so forth....all working great. By contrast, Steam Deck is running smoothly for the most part as long as its in the Steam environment and has met the Linux compatibility issues. Some games don't cut it, though, as they may be online titles that require anti-cheat software that doesn't play nice with Linux, or weird general compatibility issues with control schemes, graphics, or other issues. So far (but we'll speak more as I have time to properly test) the Ally is better here simply by virtue of supporting the OS most games are built for.

CONTROLS: For games with native console support so far both the Ally and Steam deck are totally fine. Both provide extensive options for community or custom setups, through the Armory Crate app and Steam's own support system respectively. All games I've tried on the Ally so far worked just fine with  controller support. Steam Deck has more than enough games without issue, but some games rated yellow or "?" on their platform may have....special issues with controller setups.

Issues both decks will face include games that are heavily mouse and keyboard dependent. Surprisingly I was able to get World of Warcraft running on the Ally, and it played surprisingly well (wouldn't team up on a raid with it, but for soloing? sure). I did not know that WoW now had controller support which you can enable using /console commands. 

Although the mouse pad on the Steam Deck is cool and works well for it, the only mouse movement (without attaching a mouse) on the Ally is the right analog stick. The Ally makes up for this by being very touchscreen friendly. The downside is the Windows environment is by default assuming a larger screen so touching the right area with big fingers can be frustrating sometimes. Windows 11 really needs a "portable touch edition" that works well. Win 8.1, the version used for the Surface, was a good start in that direction. 

GRAPHICS: Both of these machines look good, and I like that the Steam Deck I have uses etched glass to reduce glare. Ally does shine just a bit brighter as it seems to be able to run smoothly at a 1080p setting with higher average framerates and graphic settings. Must test more on this, though.

STORAGE AND CONNECTIVITY: So far great for both. Ally, once fully updated, has some blazing fast speeds on the UHS I and II microSD cards it supports, make sure you get at least the A2 designation (it's faster, trust me), but A1 is perfectly fine. Given both units have 512GB onboard storage, you will want to expand this a bit. 

ERGONOMICS: The Steam Deck is a clear winner here for comfort in holding and using it, but the ASUS ROG Ally is also pretty comfortable to use...just slightly less so due to being a bit more compact. The Ally is abotu the same size as my OLED Switch with the HORI Grips, and fits into the same size case. My official ASUS ROG Ally case arrives tomorrow, though, so I can let you know how that fares.

So far though, in terms of portability the Ally is ever so slightly more portable. 

BATTERY LIFE: time will tell! I'll discuss this more in Part II. I can say Steam Deck's battery life is rarely as good as I wish it were, and I suspect the Ally will probably be just as bad, but I will report more soon.

Okay, this is only Part I! More later, maybe next week, once I've had some time to really mess around with it.

PDF Round One: Fatality!!!!

 So after my post yesterday I had loaded my iPad Air with plenty of useful stuff for the D&D 5E game. Although I had all the D&D books along for the ride, the plan was to see if I could set up and use the iPad Air for some of the work. Here is what I discovered:

So yeah, turning on the device and using it creates an attention/focus vacuum that works in direct counterpoint to the social engagement of the table. I can't "multitask" good engagement at the same time as trying to focus on the device. I'd say this is a skill-based thing, but the truth is, we see evidence of this issue constantly. If we could do better at keeping our eye on things around us and on the screen at the same time then no one would ever complain about people looking at their phones in a park, or while driving, or in social circles, etc. 

It creates a palpable vacuum that is distinct, and as I tried to use the iPad to look stuff up, track initiative and so forth I felt it immediately. About the only thing it was worth doing was taking notes. The sad truth is, for me, it created a big speed bump in my ability to effectively gamemaster at the physical level. I could see being able to use this as a player, since players have "between turn" time to organize thoughts....the GM really doesn't have that time, you need to have your act together consistently, your attention on at all times and focused.

I haven't given up entirely. It may require practice and there are some apps I have for which I could see lots of handy utility (such as for initiative tracking). But for content look-up? Yeah, unfortunately this old dog found it faster and easier to just pull out the book and flip to the right page. Go figure.

From the Old Dog Learns New Tricks Dept: Going 100% PDF in a Live Game?!?!?

 It started this way: last night, as I hauled out two 30-40 lb. bags of books and campaign material, I laid it all out for the following morning so I had stuff ready for the game I run after work. I then sat down, and while perusing Drivethrurpg noticed a new compendium from Autarch for the Adventurer, Conqueror, King RPG. In looking at it I realized I had the ACKS core book and Player's Guide on my account as PDFs from many ages ago. It dawned on me that I really had no idea why I had ignored ACKS over other systems, beyond my tendency to go for physical books as a sign of official status, and had never had physical ACKS books in hand...therefore never messed with it before.

The thing is, three years of pandemic and post-pandemic existence got me quite used to using PDFs of books to prep and run games online. I am more likely to have and use the PDFs these days when running Roll20. The first time I really brought out the old tomes for actual use beyond the visceral satisfaction of reading a paper-based product was our return to live gaming a few months back. Yet, when preparing the live scenario at home I am still mostly accessing PDFs now, and only using physical books for which I have no PDF alternative.

That got me to thinking: here's ACKS, a game system I admit I have not done anything with due to the PDF-only status it holds in my collection, but it actually looks like a rather neat game (especially if you enhance it with some of the many cool supplements it has). What if I....and yes, this if crazy talk for an old Gen Xer like myself!....what if I just, kept it as a PDF collection but also tried to use it that way, too????

Madness!!!! But also....yeah. I looked at the other ACKS books I didn't have, and started shoveling print+PDF editions into the cart, and looked at the $150+ price tag to get physical copies of what I wanted. Then I noticed I could get a lot more for a mere $50 and have a very nearly complete collection of all the ACKS stuff without breaking the bank.

I have, like, 3 or 4 active current tablets that can all handle decent hi resolution copies of PDF without any speed issues. I have a very nice laptop which can do this. So....what's to prevent me from showing up with a modest bag of just the campaign stuff, GM screen, and maybe one or two main books I need, and use the iPad or laptop for the rest? Only my own hang up about physical media!

Anyway.....I am now thinking about trying this out tonight, at the game table, and my newly discovered obsession with the ACKS System may be next, to try and run a game which is 100% in my digital bookshelf. 

As a side note on ACKS: definitely a variation on old school, but I love that it uses proficiencies, and while its a class as race domain, the way ACKS does it is rather cool, with unique classes suited to the species in question (such as elven spellswords). I'll post more about that later, I imagine.